with illustrations by Clifford Carleton, 1895, 1916

XI

Niagara Revisited, Twelve Years after Their
Wedding Journey

LIFE
HAD
NOT used them ill in this time, and the
fairish treatment they had received was not wholly
unmerited. The twelve years past had made them
older, as the years must in passing. Basil was
now forty-two, and his moustache was well
sprinkled with gray. Isabel was thirty-nine, and
the parting of her hair had thinned and retreated;
but she managed to give it an effect of youthful
abundance by combing it low down upon her
forehead, and roughing it there with a wet brush.
By gaslight she was still very pretty; she
believed that she looked more interesting, and she
thought Basil's gray moustache distinguished. He
had grown stouter; he filled his double-breasted
frock coat compactly, and from time to time he had
the buttons set forward; his hands were rounded up
on the backs, and he no longer wore his old number
of gloves by two sizes; no amount of powder or
manipulation from the young lady in the shop would
induce them to go on. But this did not matter
much now, for he seldom wore gloves at all. He
was glad that the fashion suffered him to spare in
that direction, for he was obliged to look
somewhat carefully after the outgoes. The
insurance business was not what it had been, and
though Basil had comfortably established himself
in it, he had not made money. He sometimes
thought that he might have done quite as well if
he had gone into literature; but it was now too
late. They had not a very large family: they had
a boy of eleven, who "took after" his father, and
a girl of nine, who took after the boy; but with
the American feeling that their children must have
the best of everything, they made it an expensive
family, and they spent nearly all Basil earned.

The narrowness
of their means, as well as their
household cares, had kept them from taking many
long journeys. They passed their winters in
Boston, and their summers on the South Shore,-
cheaper than the North Shore, and near enough for
Basil to go up and down every day for business;
but they promised themselves that some day they
would revisit certain points on their wedding
journey, and perhaps somewhere find their lost
second-youth on the track. It was not that they
cared to be young, but they wished the children to
see them as they used to be when they thought
themselves very old; and one lovely afternoon in
June they started for Niagara.

It had
been very hot for several days, but that
morning the east wind came in, and crisped the air
till it seemed to rustle like tinsel, and the sky
was as sincerely and solidly blue as if it had
been chromoed. They felt that they were really
looking up into the roof of the world, when they
glanced at it; but when an old gentleman hastily
kissed a young woman, and commended her to the
conductor as being one who was going all the way
to San Francisco alone, and then risked his life
by stepping off the moving train, the vastness of
the great American fact began to affect Isabel
disagreeably. "Isn't it too big, Basil?"
she pleaded, peering timidly out of the little
municipal consciousness in which she had been so
long housed. In that seclusion she had suffered
certain original tendencies to increase upon her:
her nerves were more sensitive and electrical; her
apprehensions had multiplied quite beyond the
ratio of the dangers that beset her; and Basil had
counted upon a tonic effect of the change the
journey would make in their daily lives. She
looked ruefully out of the window at the familiar
suburbs whisking out of sight, and the continental
immensity that advanced devouringly upon her. But
they had the best section in the very centre of
the sleeping-car,--she drew what consolation she
could from the fact,--and the children's premature
demand for lunch helped her to forget her
anxieties; they began to be hungry as soon as the
train started. She found that she had not put up
sandwiches enough; and when she told Basil that he
would have to get out somewhere and buy some cold
chicken, he asked her what in the world had become
of that whole ham she had had boiled. It seemed
to him, he said, that there was enough of it to
subsist them to Niagara and back; and he went on
as some men do, while Somerville vanished, and
even Tufts College, which assails the Bostonian
vision from every point of the compass, was shut
out by the curve at the foot of the Belmont hills.

They had
chosen the Hoosac Tunnel route to
Niagara, because, as Basil said, their experience
of travel had never yet included a very long
tunnel, and it would be a signal fact by which the
children would always remember the journey, if
nothing else remarkable happened to impress it
upon them. Indeed, they were so much concerned in
it that they began to ask when they should come to
this tunnel, even before they began to ask for
lunch; and the long time before they reached it
was not perceptibly shortened by Tom's
quarter-hourly consultations of his father's
watch.

It scarcely
seemed to Basil and Isabel that their
fellow-passengers were so interesting as their
fellow-passengers used to be in their former days
of travel. They were soberly dressed, and were
all of a middle-aged sobriety of deportment, from
which nothing salient offered itself for
conjecture or speculation; and there was little
within the car to take their minds from the
brilliant young world that flashed and sang by
them outside. The belated spring had ripened,
with its frequent rains, into the perfection of
early summer; the grass was thicker and the
foliage denser than they had ever seen it before;
and when they had run out into the hills beyond
Fitchburg, they saw the laurel in bloom. It was
everywhere in the woods, lurking like drifts among
the underbrush, and overflowing the tops, and
stealing down the hollows, of the railroad
embankments; a snow of blossom flushed with a mist
of pink. Its shy, wild beauty ceased whenever the
train stopped, but the orioles made up for its
absence with their singing in the village trees
about the stations; and though Fitchburg and
Ayer's Junction and Athol are not names that
invoke historical or romantic associations, the
hearts of Basil and Isabel began to stir with the
joy of travel before they had passed these points.
At the first Basil got out to buy the cold chicken
which had been commanded, and he recognized in the
keeper of the railroad restaurant their former
conductor, who had been warned by the spirits
never to travel without a flower of some sort
carried between his lips, and who had preserved
his own life and the lives of his passengers for
many years by this simple device. His presence
lent the sponge cake and rhubarb pie and baked
beans a supernatural interest, and reconciled
Basil to the toughness of the athletic bird which
the mystical ex-partner of fate had sold him; he
justly reflected that if he had heard the story of
the restaurateur's superstition in a foreign land,
or another time, he would have found in it a
certain poetry. It was this willingness to find
poetry in things around them that kept his life
and Isabel's fresh, and they taught their children
the secret of their elixir. To be sure, it was
only a genre poetry, but it was such as
has always inspired English art and song; and now
the whole family enjoyed, as if it had been a
passage from Goldsmith or Wordsworth, the flying
sentiment of the railroad side. There was a
simple interior at one place, a small shanty,
showing through the open door a cook stove
surmounted by the evening coffee-pot, with a lazy
cat outstretched upon the floor in the middle
distance, and an old woman standing just outside
the threshold to see the train go by,--which had
an unrivaled value till they came to a
superannuated car on a siding in the woods, in
which the railroad workmen boarded: some were
lounging on the platform and at the open windows,
while others were "washing up" for supper, and the
whole scene was full of holiday ease and sylvan
comradery that went to the hearts of the
sympathetic spectators. Basil had lately been
reading aloud the delightful history of Rudder
Grange, and the children, who had made their
secret vows never to live in anything but an old
canal-boat when they grew up, owned that there
were fascinating possibilities in a worn-out
railroad car.

The lovely
Deerfield Valley began to open on
either hand, with smooth stretches of the quiet
river, and breadths of grassy intervale and
table-land; the elms grouped themselves like the
trees of a park; here and there the nearer hills
broke away, and revealed long, deep, chasmed
hollows, full of golden light and delicious
shadow. There were people rowing on the water;
and every pretty town had some touch of
picturesqueness or pastoral charm to offer: at
Greenfield, there were children playing in the
new-mown hay along the railroad embankment; at
Shelburne Falls, there was a game of cricket going
on (among the English operatives of the cutlery
works, as Basil boldly asserted). They looked
down from their car-window on a young lady
swinging in a hammock, in her door-yard, and on an
old gentleman hoeing his potatoes; a group of
girls waved their handkerchiefs to the passing
train, and a boy paused in weeding a garden
bed,--and probably denied that he had paused,
later. In the mean time the golden haze along the
mountain side changed to a clear, pearly lustre,
and the quiet evening possessed the quiet
landscape. They confessed to each other that it
was all as sweet and beautiful as it used to be;
and in fact they had seen palaces, in other days,
which did not give them the pleasure they found in
a woodcutter's shanty, losing itself among the
shadows in a solitude of the hills. The tunnel,
after this, was a gross and material sensation;
but they joined the children in trying to hold and
keep it, and Basil let the boy time it by his
watch. "Now," said Tom, when five minutes were
gone, "we are under the very centre of the
mountain." But the tunnel was like all
accomplished facts, all hopes fulfilled, valueless
to the soul, and scarcely appreciable to the
sense; and the children emerged at North Adams
with but a mean opinion of that great feat of
engineering. Basil drew a pretty moral from their
experience. "If you rode upon a comet you would
be disappointed. Take my advice, and never ride
upon a comet. I shouldn't object to your riding
on a little meteor,--you wouldn't expect much of
that; but I warn you against comets; they are as
bad as tunnels."

The children
thought this moral was a joke at
their expense, and as they were a little sleepy
they permitted themselves the luxury of feeling
trifled with. But they woke, refreshed and
encouraged, from slumbers that had evidently been
unbroken, though they both protested that they had
not slept a wink the whole night, and gave
themselves up to wonder at the interminable levels
of Western New York over which the train was
running. The longing to come to an edge,
somewhere, that the New England traveller
experiences on this plain was inarticulate with
the children; but it breathed in the sigh with
which Isabel welcomed even the architectural
inequalities of a city into which they drew in the
early morning. This city showed to their weary
eyes a noble stretch of river, from the waters of
which lofty piles of buildings rose abruptly; and
Isabel, being left to guess where they were, could
think of no other place so picturesque as
Rochester.

"Yes," said
her husband; "it is our own Enchanted
City. I wonder if that unstinted hospitality is
still dispensed by the good head waiter at the
hotel where we stopped, to bridal parties who have
passed the ordeal of the haughty hotel clerk. I
wonder what has become of that hotel clerk.

Has he
fallen, through pride, to some lower level,
or has he bowed his arrogant spirit to the demands
of advancing civilization, and realized that he is
the servant, and not the master, of the public? I
think I've noticed, since his time, a growing
kindness in hotel clerks; or perhaps I have become
of a more impressive presence; they certainly
unbend to me a little more. I should like to go
up to our hotel, and try myself on our old enemy,
if he is still there. I can fancy how his shirt
front has expanded in these twelve years past; he
has grown a little bald, after the fashion of
middle-aged hotel clerks, but he parts his hair
very much on one side, and brushes it squarely
across his forehead to hide his loss; the
forefinger that he touches that little snap-bell
with, when he doesn't look at you, must be very
pudgy now. Come, let us get out and breakfast at
Rochester; they will give us broiled white-fish;
and we can show the children where Sam Patch
jumped over Genesee Falls, and"

"No, no,
Basil," cried his wife. "It would be
sacrilege! All that is sacred to those dear young
days of ours; and I wouldn't think of trying to
repeat it. Our own ghosts would rise up in that
dining-room to reproach us for our intrusion! Oh,
perhaps we have done a wicked thing in coming this
journey! We ought to have left the past alone; we
shall only mar our memories of all these beautiful
places. Do you suppose Buffalo can be as
poetical as it was then? Buffalo! The name
doesn't invite the Muse very much. Perhaps it
never was very poetical! Oh, Basil,
dear, I'm afraid we have only come to find out
that we were mistaken about everything! Let's
leave Rochester alone, at any rate!"

"I'm not
troubled! We won't disturb our dream of
Rochester; but I don't despair of Buffalo. I'm
sure that Buffalo will be all that our fancy ever
painted it. I believe in Buffalo."

"Well, well,"
murmured Isabel, "I hope you're
right;" and she put some things together for
leaving their car at Buffalo, while they were
still two hours away.

When they
reached a place where the land mated its
level with the level of the lake, they ran into a
wilderness of railroad cars, in a world where life
seemed to be operated solely by locomotives and
their helpless minions. The bellowing and
bleating trains were arriving in every direction,
not only along the ground floor of the plain, but
stately stretches of trestle-work, which curved
and extended across the plain, carried them to and
fro overhead. The travellers owned that this
railroad suburb had its own impressiveness, and
they said that the trestle-work was as noble in
effect as the lines of aqueduct that stalk across
the Roman Campagna. Perhaps this was because they
had not seen the Campagna or its aqueducts for a
great while; but they were so glad to find
themselves in the spirit of their former journey
again that they were amiable to everything. When
the children first caught sight of the lake's
delicious blue, and cried out that it was lovelier
than the sea, they felt quite a local pride in
their preference. It was what Isabel had said
twelve years before, on first beholding the lake.

But they
did not really see the lake till they had
taken the train for Niagara Falls, after
breakfasting in the depot, where the children,
used to the severe native or the patronizing Irish
ministrations of Boston restaurants and hotels,
reveled for the first time in the affectionate
devotion of a black waiter. There was already a
ridiculous abundance and variety on the table; but
this waiter brought them strawberries and again
strawberries, and repeated plates of griddle cakes
with maple syrup; and he hung over the back of
first one chair and then another with an unselfish
joy in the appetites of the breakfasters which
gave Basil renewed hopes of his race. "Such
rapture in serving argues a largeness of nature
which will be recognized hereafter," he said,
feeling about in his waistcoat pocket for a
quarter. It seemed a pity to render the waiter's
zeal retroactively interested, but in view of the
fact that he possibly expected the quarter, there
was nothing else to do; and by a mysterious stroke
of gratitude the waiter delivered them into the
hands of a friend, who took another quarter from
them for carrying their bags and wraps to the
train. This second retainer approved their
admiration of the aesthetic forms and colors of
the depot colonnade; and being asked if that were
the depot whose roof had fallen in some years
before, proudly replied that it was.

"There were
a great many killed, weren't there?"
asked Basil, with sympathetic satisfaction in the
disaster. The porter seemed humiliated; he
confessed the mortifying truth that the loss of
life was small, but he recovered ajust
self-respect in adding, "If the roof had fallen in
five minutes sooner, it would have killed about
three hundred people."

Basil had
promised the children a sight of the
Rapids before they reached the Falls, and they
held him rigidly accountable from the moment they
entered the train, and began to run out of the
city between the river and the canal. He
attempted a diversion with the canal boats, and
tried to bring forward the subject of Rudder
Grange in that connection. They said that the
canal boats were splendid, but they were looking
for the Rapids now and they declined to be
interested in a window in one ofthe boats, which
Basil said was just like the window that the
Rudder Granger and the boarder had popped Pomona
out of when they took her for a burglar.

"You spoil
those children, Basil," said his wife,
as they clambered over him, and clamored for the
Rapids.

"At present
I'm giving them an object-lesson in
patience and self-denial; they are experiencing
the fact that they can't have the Rapids till they
get to them, and probably they'll be disappointed
in them when they arrive."

In fact,
they valued the Rapids very little more
than the Hoosac Tunnel, when they came in sight of
them, at last; and Basil had some question in his
own mind whether the Rapids had not dwindled since
his former visit. He did not breathe this doubt
to Isabel, however, and she arrived at the Falls
with unabated expectations. They were going to
spend only half a day there; and they turned into
the station, away from the phalanx of omnibuses,
when they dismounted from their train. They
seemed, as before, to be the only passengers who
had arrived, and they found an abundant choice of
carriages waiting in the street, outside the
station. The Niagara hackman may once have been a
predatory and very rampant animal, but public
opinion, long expressed through the public prints,
has reduced him to silence and meekness.
Apparently, he may not so much as beckon with his
whip to the arriving wayfarer; it is certain that
he cannot cross the pavement to the station door;
and Basil, inviting one of them to negotiation,
was himself required by the attendant policeman to
step out to the curbstone, and complete his
transaction there. It was an impressive
illustration of the power of a free press, but
upon the whole Basil found the effect melancholy;
it had the saddening quality which inheres in
every sort of perfection. The hackman, reduced to
entire order, appealed to his compassion, and he
had not the heart to beat him down from his
moderate first demand, as perhaps he ought to have
done.

They drove
directly to the cataract, and found
themselves in the pretty grove beside the American
Fall, and in the air whose dampness was as
familiar as if they had breathed it all their
childhood. It was full now of the fragrance of
some sort of wild blossom; and again they had that
old, entrancing sense of the mingled awfulness and
loveliness of the great spectacle. This sylvan
perfume, the gayety of the sunshine, the mildness
of the breeze that stirred the leaves overhead,
and the bird-singing that made itself heard amid
the roar of the Rapids and the solemn incessant
plunge of the cataract, moved their hearts, and
made them children with the boy and girl, who
stood rapt for a moment and then broke into joyful
wonder. They could sympathize with the ardor with
which Tom longed to tempt fate at the brink of the
river, and over the tops of the parapets which
have been built along the edge of the precipice,
and they equally entered into the terror with
which Bella screamed at his suicidal zeal. They
joined her in restraining him; they reduced him to
a beggarly account of half a dozen stones, flung
into the Rapids at not less than ten paces from
the brink; and they would not let him toss the
smallest pebble over the parapet, though he
laughed to scorn the notion that anybody should be
hurt by them below.

It seemed
to them that the triviality of man in
the surroundings of the Falls had increased with
the lapse of time. There were more booths and
bazars, and more colored feather fans with whole
birds spitted in the centres; and there was an
offensive array of blue and green and yellow
glasses on the shore, through which you were
expected to look at the Falls gratis. They missed
the simple dignity of the blanching Indian maids,
who used to squat about on the grass, with their
laps full of moccasins and pin-cushions. But, as
of old, the photographer came out of his saloon,
and invited them to pose for a family group;
representing that the light and the spray were
singularly propitious, and that everything in
nature invited them to be taken. Basil put him
off gently, for the sake of the time when he had
refused to be photographed in a bridal group, and
took refuge from him in the long low building from
which you descend to the foot of the cataract.

The grove
beside the American Fall has been
inclosed, and named Prospect Park, by a company
which exacts half a dollar for admittance, and
then makes you free of all its wonders and
conveniences, for which you once had to pay
severally. This is well enough; but formerly you
could refuse to go down the inclined tramway, and
now you cannot, without feeling that you have
failed to get your money's worth. It was in this
illogical spirit of economy that Basil invited his
family to the descent; but Isabel shook her head.
"No, you go with the children," she said, "and I
will stay here, till you get back;" her agonized
countenance added, "and pray for you;" and Basil
took his children on either side of him, and
rumbled down the terrible descent with much of the
excitement that attends travel in an open
horse-car. When he stepped out of the car he felt
that increase of courage which comes to every man
after safely passing through danger. He resolved
to brave the mists and slippery stones at the foot
of the Fall; and he would have plunged at once
into this fresh peril, if he had not been
prevented by the Prospect Park Company. This
ingenious association has built a large
tunnel-like shed quite to the water's edge, so
that you cannot view the cataract as you once
could, at a reasonable remoteness, but must emerge
from the building into a storm of spray. The roof
of the tunnel is painted with a lively effect in
party-colored stripes, and is lettered "The Shadow
of the Rock," so that you take it at first to be
an appeal to your aesthetic sense; but the real
object of the company is not apparent till you put
your head out into the tempest, when you agree
with the nearest guide--and one is always very
near--that you had better have an oil-skin dress,
as Basil did. He told the guide that he did not
wish to go under the Fall, and the guide
confidentially admitted that there was no fun in
that, anyway; and in the mean time he equipped him
and his children for their foray into the mist.
When they issued forth, under their friend's
leadership, Basil felt that, with his children
clinging to each hand, he looked like some sort of
animal with its young, and, though not unsocial by
nature, he was glad to be among strangers for the
time. They climbed hither and thither over the
rocks, and lifted their streaming faces for the
views which the guide pointed out; and in a rift
of the spray they really caught one glorious
glimpse of the whole sweep of the Fall. The next
instant the spray swirled back, and they were glad
to turn for a sight of the rainbow, lying in a
circle on the rocks as quietly and naturally as if
that had been the habit of rainbows ever since the
flood. This was all there was to be done, and
they streamed back into the tunnel, where they
disrobed in the face of a menacing placard, which
announced that the hire of a guide and a dress for
going under the Fall was one dollar.

"Will they
make you pay a dollar for each of us,
papa?" asked Tom, fearfully.

"Oh, pooh,
no!" returned Basil; "we haven't been
under the Fall." But he sought out the proprietor
with a trembling heart. The proprietor was a man
of severely logical mind: he said that the charge
would be three dollars, for they had had the use
of the dresses and the guide just the same as if
they had gone under the Fall; and he refused to
recognize anything misleading in the dressing-room
placard. In fine, he left Basil without a leg to
stand upon. It was not so much the three dollars
as the sense of having been swindled that vexed
him; and he instantly resolved not to share his
annoyance with Isabel. Why, indeed, should he put
that burden upon her? If she were none the wiser,
she would be none the poorer; and he ought to be
willing to deny himself her sympathy for the sake
of sparing her needless pain.

He met
her at the top of the inclined tramway with
a face of exemplary unconsciousness, and he
listened with her to the tale their coachman told,
as they sat in a pretty arbor looking out on the
Rapids, of a Frenchman and his wife. This
Frenchman had returned, one morning, from a stroll
on Goat Island, and reported with much apparent
concern that his wife had fallen into the water,
and been carried over the Fall. It was so natural
for a man to grieve for the loss of his wife,
under the peculiar circumstances, that every one
condoled with the widower; but when, a few days
later, her body was found, and the distracted
husband refused to come back from New York to her
funeral, there was a general regret that he had
not been arrested. A flash of conviction illumed
the whole fact to Basil's guilty consciousness:
this unhappy Frenchman had paid a dollar for the
use of an oil-skin suit at the foot of the Fall,
and had been ashamed to confess the swindle to his
wife, till, in a moment of remorse and madness, he
shouted the fact into her ear, and then-Basil
looked at the mother of his children, and
registered a vow that if he got away from Niagara
without being forced to a similar excess he would
confess his guilt to Isabel at the very first act
of spendthrift profusion she committed. The guide
pointed out the rock in the Rapids to which Avery
had clung for twenty-four hours before he was
carried over the Falls, and to the morbid fancy of
the deceitful husband Isabel's bonnet ribbons
seemed to flutter from the pointed reef. He could
endure the pretty arbor no longer. "Come,
children!" he cried, with a wild, unnatural
gayety; "let us go to Goat Island, and see the
Bridge to the Three Sisters, that your mother was
afraid to walk back on after she had crossed it."

"For shame,
Basil!" retorted Isabel. "You know it
was you who were afraid of that bridge."

The children,
who knew the story by heart, laughed
with their father at the monstrous pretension; and
his simulated hilarity only increased upon paying
a toll of two dollars at the Goat Island bridge.

"What extortion!"
cried Isabel, with an
indignation that secretly unnerved him. He
trembled upon the verge of confession; but he had
finally the moral force to resist. He suffered
her to compute the cost of their stay at Niagara
without allowing those three dollars to enter into
her calculation; he even began to think what
justificative extravagance he could tempt her to.
He suggested the purchase of local bricabrac; he
asked her if she would not like to dine at the
International, for old times' sake. But she
answered, with disheartening virtue, that they
must not think of such a thing, after what they
had spent already. Nothing, perhaps, marked the
confirmed husband in Basil more than these hidden
fears and reluctances.

In the
mean time Isabel ignorantly abandoned
herself to the charm of the place, which she found
unimpaired, in spite of the reported ravages of
improvement about Niagara. Goat Island was still
the sylvan solitude of twelve years ago, haunted
by even fewer nymphs and dryads than of old. The
air was full of the perfume that scented it at
Prospect Park; the leaves showered them with shade
and sun, as they drove along. "If it were not for
the children here," she said, "I should think that
our first drive on Goat Island had never ended."

She sighed
a little, and Basil leaned forward and
took her hand in his. "It never has ended; it's
the same drive; only we are younger now, and enjoy
it more." It always touched him when Isabel was
sentimental about the past, for the years had
tended to make her rather more seriously maternal
towards him than towards the other children; and
he recognized that these fond reminiscences were
the expression of the girlhood still lurking deep
within her heart.

She shook
her head. "No, but I'm willing the
children should be young in our place. It's only
fair they should have their turn."

She remained
in the carriage, while Basil visited
the various points of view on Luna Island with the
boy and girl. A boy is probably of considerable
interest to himself, and a man looks back at his
own boyhood with some pathos. But in his
actuality a boy has very little to commend him to
the toleration of other human beings. Tom was
very well, as boys go; but now his contribution to
the common enjoyment was to venture as near as
possible to all perilous edges; to throw stones
into the water, and to make as if to throw them
over precipices on the people below; to pepper his
father with questions, and to collect cumbrous
mementos of the vegetable and mineral kingdoms.
He kept the carriage waiting a good five minutes,
while he could cut his initials on a hand-rail.
"You can come back and see em on your bridal
tower," said the driver. Isabel gave a little
start, as if she had almost thought of something
she was trying to think of.

They occasionally
met ladies driving, and
sometimes they encountered a couple making a tour
of the island on foot. But none of these people
were young, and Basil reported that the Three
Sisters were inhabited only by persons of like
maturity; even a group of people who were eating
lunch to the music of the shouting Rapids, on the
outer edge of the last Sister, were no younger,
apparently.

Isabel did
not get out of the carriage to verify
his report; she preferred to refute his story of
her former panic on those islands by remaining
serenely seated while he visited them. She thus
lost a superb novelty which nature has lately
added to the wonders of this Fall, in that place
at the edge of the great Horse Shoe where the rock
has fallen and left a peculiarly shaped chasm:
through this the spray leaps up from below, and
flashes a hundred feet into the air, in
rocket-like jets and points, and then breaks and
dissolves away in the pyrotechnic curves of a
perpetual Fourth of July. Basil said something
like this in celebrating the display, with the
purpose of rendering her loss more poignant; but
she replied, with tranquil piety, that she would
rather keep her Niagara unchanged; and she
declared that, as she understood him, there must
be something rather cheap and conscious in the new
feature. She approved, however, of the change
that had removed that foolish little Terrapin
Tower from the brink on which it stood, and she
confessed that she could have enjoyed a little
variety in the stories the driver told them of the
Indian burial-ground on the island: they were
exactly the stories she and Basil had heard twelve
years before, and the ill-starred goats, from
which the island took its name, perished once more
in his narrative.

Under the
influence of his romances our travellers
began to find the whole scene hackneyed; and they
were glad to part from him a little sooner than
they had bargained to do. They strolled about the
anomalous village on foot, and once more marveled
at the paucity of travel and the enormity of the
local preparation. Surely the hotels are nowhere
else in the world so large! Could there ever have
been visitors enough at Niagara to fill them?
They were built so big for some good reason, no
doubt; but it is no more apparent than why all
these magnificent equipages are waiting about the
empty streets for the people who never come to
hire them.

"It seems
to me that I don't see so many strangers
here as I used," Basil had suggested to their
driver.

"Oh, they
haven't commenced coming yet," he
replied, with hardy cheerfulness, and pretended
that they were plenty enough in July and August.

They went
to dine at the modest restaurant of a
colored man, who advertised a table
d'hote dinner on a board at his door; and
they put their misgivings to him, which seemed to
grieve him, and he contended that Niagara was as
prosperous and as much resorted to as ever. In
fact, they observed that their regret for the
supposed decline of the Falls as a summer resort
was nowhere popular in the village, and they
desisted in their offers of sympathy, after their
rebuff from the restaurateur.

Basil got
his family away to the station after
dinner, and left them there, while he walked down
the village street, for a closer inspection of the
hotels. At the door of the largest a pair of
children sported in the solitude, as fearlessly as
the birds on Selkirk's island;
looking into
the hotel, he saw a few porters and
call-boys seated in statuesque repose against the
wall, while the clerk pined in dreamless
inactivity behind the register; some deserted
ladies flitted through the door of the parlor at
the side. He recalled the evening of his former
visit, when he and Isabel had met the Ellisons in
that parlor, and it seemed, in the retrospect, a
scene of the wildest gayety. He turned for
consolation into the barber's shop, where he found
himself the only customer, and no busy sound of
"Next" greeted his ear. But the barber, like all
the rest, said that Niagara was not unusually
empty; and he came out feeling bewildered and
defrauded. Surely the agent of the boats which
descend the Rapids of the St. Lawrence must be
frank, if Basil went to him and pretended that he
was going to buy a ticket. But a glance at the
agent's sign showed Basil that the agent, with his
brave jollity of manner and his impressive
"Good-morning," had passed away from the
deceits of travel, and that he was now inherited
by his widow, who in turn was absent, and
temporarily represented by their son. The boy, in
supplying Basil with an advertisement of the line,
made a specious show of haste, as if there were a
long queue of tourists waiting behind him to be
served with tickets. Perhaps there was, indeed, a
spectral line there, but Basil was the only
tourist present in the flesh, and he shivered in
his isolation, and fled with the advertisement in
his hand. Isabel met him at the door of the
station with a frightened face.

"Basil," she
cried, "I have found out what the
trouble is! Where are the brides?"

He took
her outstretched hands in his, and passing
one of them through his arm walked with her apart
from the children, who were examining at the
news-man's booth the moccasins and the birch-bark
bricabrac of the Irish aborigines, and the cups
and vases of Niagara spar imported from
Devonshire.

"My dear,"
he said, "there are no brides;
everybody was married twelve years ago, and the
brides are middle-aged mothers of families now,
and don't come to Niagara if they are wise.

"Yes," she
desolately asserted, "that is so!
Something has been hanging over me ever since we
came, and suddenly I realized that it was the
absence of the brides. But--but--Down at the
hotels--Didn't you see anything bridal there?
When the omnibuses arrived, was there no burst of
minstrelsy? Was there"--She could not go on, but
sank nervelessly into the nearest seat.
"Perhaps," said Basil, dreamily regarding the
contest of Tom and Bella for a newly-purchased
paper of sour cherries, and helplessly forecasting
in his remoter mind the probable consequences,
"there were both brides and minstrelsy at the
hotel, if I had only had the eyes to see and the
ears to hear. In this world, my dear, we are
always of our own time, and we live amid
contemporary things. I dare say there were
middle-aged people at Niagara when we were here
before, but we did not meet them, nor they us. I
dare say that the place is now swarming with
bridal couples, and it is because they are
invisible and inaudible to us that it seems such a
howling wilderness. But the hotel clerks and the
restaurateurs and the hackmen know them, and that
is the reason why they receive with surprise and
even offense our sympathy for their loneliness.
Do you suppose, Isabel, that if you were to lay
your head on my shoulder, in a bridal manner, it
would do anything to bring us en rapport
with that lost bridal world again?"

Isabel caught
away her hand. "Basil," she cried,
"it would be disgusting! I wouldn't do it for the
world--not even for that world. I saw
one middle-aged couple on Goat Island, while you
were down at the Cave of the Winds, or somewhere,
with the children. They were sitting on some
steps, he a step below her, and he seemed to want
to put his head on her knee; but I gazed at him
sternly, and he didn't dare. We should look like
them, if we yielded to any outburst of affection.
Don't you think we should look like them?"

They glanced
at each other with a flash of
resentment, and then they both laughed. "We
couldn't look young if we quarreled a week," he
said. "We had better content ourselves with
feeling young, as I hope we shall do if we live to
be ninety. It will be the loss of others if they
don't see our bloom upon us. Shall I get you a
paper of cherries, Isabel? The children seem to
be enjoying them."

Isabel sprang
upon her offspring with a cry of
despair. "Oh, what shall I do? Now we shall not
have a wink of sleep with them to-night. Where
is that nux?" She hunted for the medicine
in her bag, and the children submitted; for they
had eaten all the cherries, and they took their
medicine without a murmur. "I wonder at your
letting them eat the sour things, Basil," said
their mother, when the children had run off to the
news-stand again.

"I wonder
that you left me to see what they were
doing," promptly retorted their father.

"It was
your nonsense about the brides," said
Isabel; "and I think this has been a lesson to us.
Don't let them get anything else to eat,
dearest."

"They are
safe; they have no more money. They are
frugally confining themselves to the admiration of
the Japanese bows and arrows yonder. Why have our
Indians taken to making Japanese bows and arrows?"

Isabel despised
the small pleasantry. "Then you
saw nobody at the hotel?" she asked.

"Ah, yes,"
said Isabel; "that was where we met
them. How long ago it seems! And poor little
Kitty! I wonder what has become of them? But I'm
glad they're not here. That's what makes you
realize your age: meeting the same people in the
same place a great while after, and seeing how old
they've grown. I don't think I could bear to see
Kitty Ellison again. I'm glad she didn't come to
visit us in Boston, though, after what happened,
she couldn't, poor thing! I wonder if she's ever
regretted her breaking with him in the way she
did. It's a very painful thing to think of,--such
an inconclusive conclusion; it always seemed as if
they ought to meet again, somewhere."

"Oh yes,
you did; but you forget everything. You
know that they met two Boston ladies just after
they were engaged, and she believed that he didn't
introduce her because he was ashamed of her
countrified appearance before them."

"He might
not have meant to ignore her," answered
Isabel thoughtfully; "he might have chosen not to
introduce her because he felt too proud of her to
subject her to any possible misappreciation from
them. You might have looked at it in that way."

"Why didn'tyou look at it in that way?
You advised her against giving him another chance.
Why did you?"

"Why?" repeated
Isabel, absently. "Oh, a woman
doesn't judge a man by what he does, but
by what he is! I knew that if she
dismissed him it was because she never really had
trusted or could trust his love; and I thought she
had better not make another trial."

"Well, very
possibly you were right. At any rate,
you have the consolation of knowing that it's too
late to help it now."

"Yes, it's
too late," said Isabel; and her
thoughts went back to her meeting with the young
girl whom she had liked so much, and whose after
history had interested her so painfully. It
seemed to her a hard world that could come to
nothing better than that for the girl whom she had
seen in her first glimpse of it that night. Where
was she now? What had become of her? If she had
married that man, would she have been any happier?
Marriage was not the poetic dream of perfect union
that a girl imagines it; she herself had found
that out. It was a state of trial, of probation;
it was an ordeal, not an ecstasy. If she and
Basil had broken each other's hearts and parted,
would not the fragments of their lives have been
on a much finer, much higher plane? Had not the
commonplace, every-day experiences of marriage
vulgarized them both? To be sure, there were the
children; but if they had never had the children,
she would never have missed them; and if Basil
had, for example, died just before they were
married--She started from this wicked reverie, and
ran towards her husband, whose broad, honest back,
with no visible neck or shirt-collar, was turned
towards her, as he stood, with his head thrown up,
studying a time-table on the wall; she passed her
arm convulsively through his, and pulled him away

"It's time
to be getting our bags out to the
train, Basil! Come, Bella! Tom, we're going!"

The children
reluctantly turned from the
news-man's trumpery; and they all went out to the
track, and took seats on the benches under the
colonnade. While they waited, the train for
Buffalo drew in, and they remained watching it
till it started. In the last car that passed
them, when it was fairly under way, a face looked
full at Isabel from one of the windows. In that
moment of astonishment she forgot to observe
whether it was sad or glad; she only saw, or
believed she saw, the light ofrecognition dawn
into its eyes, and then it was gone.

"Oh no,
it wasn't," said Basil, easily. "It
looked like her; but it looked at least ten years
older."

"Why, of
course it was! We're all ten years
older," returned his wife in such indignation at
his stupidity that she neglected to insist upon
his stopping the train, which was rapidly
diminishing in the perspective.

He declared
it was only a fancied resemblance; she
contended that this was in the neighborhood of
Eriecreek, and it must be Kitty; and thus one of
their most inveterate disagreements began.

Their own
train drew into the depot, and they
disputed upon the fact in question till they
entered on the passage of the Suspension Bridge.
Then Basil rose and called the children to his
side. On the left hand, far up the river, the
great Fall shows, with its mists at its foot and
its rainbow on its brow, as silent and still as if
it were vastly painted there; and below the
bridge, on the right, leap the Rapids in the
narrow gorge, like seas on a rocky shore. "Look
on both sides, now," he said to the children.
"Isabel, you must see this!"

Isabel had
been preparing for the passage of this
bridge ever since she left Boston. "Never!" she
exclaimed. She instantly closed her eyes, and hid
her face in her handkerchief. Thanks to this
precaution of hers, the train crossed the bridge
in perfect safety.